Lessons from Kenya for the Global Health Initiative

February 23, 2011

The Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI), announced in May 2009 as a six-year, $63-billion program, has put a strong emphasis on integration of health services, building largely on the work of PEPFAR. As implementation of GHI is moving ahead and country strategies are being developed, this is an important moment to bring forward lessons learned from the experience of integration in the U.S. government’s health and development programs. A key example involves U.S. health programs in Kenya over the past five years, notably the APHIA program (the AIDS, Population and Health Integrated Assistance program), which developed an integrated program based on the PEPFAR platform. This paper finds that the APHIA programs in Kenya hold some important lessons that should help inform GHI implementation. Since Kenya has been designated one of eight GHI-Plus countries, the emphasis on program integration in those U.S. government programs is especially relevant.